Group versus Individual Blogs
Following are several blog posts comparing group versus individual blogs, with a focus on blogging within education or business. The main points from the articles are highlighted here:
Group Blogs:
Content flows between authors
Social networking tool
Published more for the group
Requires less time of authors than individual
Each author can provide unique perspective
More organized and compact than individual
Generate more regular posts and reply posts than individual
Individual Blogs:
Promotes self
Primarily one’s own experiences
More rich, detailed narratives – more autobiographical/diary-like
More “outside” readers enjoy reading individual rather than group blogs
Individual bloggers develop a clearer, more diversified online personality than group bloggers
My conclusion from today’s research is that it doesn’t really matter which method of blogging you choose. Each of the below articles are highly subjective and most do not pertain to your purpose of blogging.
Next time, I will look at comparisons between group blogs and online discussion boards, particularly WebCT. I will review the research, break it down, and extrapolate the main points. As I’m collecting this research, let me know which method of online communication you think would work best for your Spring course. When you have decided, I will learn how to properly set it up for your course so its ready to go for January.
Brad
Here are the articles I researched today (the hyperlinks are listed first):
http://www.sinkingships.net/group-vs-individual-blogging/
Group vs. individual blogging
I’ll break my holiday (and GRE)-induced silence to follow up on a conversation that I was having with Dan and Karine on their respective blogs—the idea of group vs. individual blogging. Which is preferable in the context of student-generated admission blogs?
My gut feeling is that the closer admissions blogs hew to their prospectives’ online behavior, the better. I like the idea of a group blog. To me, the interaction between students on a group blog is what makes it more interesting than a collection of student bloggers that don’t talk to one another. It’s like that title screen on the Brady Bunch: What makes the family compelling is that they’re interacting with each other even though they’re in separate boxes. (I will apologize for this metaphor in advance, because I’m sure it will elicit groans.) On a group student blog such as the University of Sydney’s Sydney Life group blog, the students have created a small community rather than a collection of hermetically sealed individuals. At Ball State University, the main page of student bloggers is even set up as a Brady Bunch-esque series of boxes. A quick glance at BSU’s bloggers reveals that they are indeed aware of each other and mention their fellow bloggers in their posts.
Is this a good thing for admissions-oriented blogs? Well, it depends. In the case of Sydney Life, the goal of the blog is to provide advice and information to incoming students and—to a lesser extent—prospective students. This differs from other admissions blogs which aim to promote archetypal personalities as representatives of a particular institution. The latter type is more focused on presenting the cohesive story of an individual. Reading one of these blogs is like reading someone’s personal diary.
Both types of sites exist outside the admissions sphere. There are individual blogs concerned with promotion of the self and there are group blogs where the content flows from interaction between the authors. The line between the two types is blurring, particularly with the growing popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. On these sites, users are involved in both maintenance of their digital identity and participation in their social circle. Their blog postings exhibit the characteristics of a group blog (responding to other users’ postings) while retaining the core individuality of a personal blog (posting primarily about their own experiences).
There may be a limit to the benefits of a group blog, however—at a certain point, group blogs may become too self-referential and exclusionary to outsiders. You can see this in a group blog where the vast majority of the comments come from group members. There’s a lot of activity, but a lot of it is internal and the external audience (prospective students) may be discouraged from participating in such an insular group. There’s a fine line that admissions blogs have to walk between the individuality of its student bloggers and the interplay within the group. Awareness of and interaction with your fellow bloggers is great as long as you’re mindful of the wider audience (and the ultimate goal of the blog) as well.
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/04/individual_vs_t.html
April 28, 2006
Individual vs. Team Blogs
I have a couple of half-day workshops on blog strategy coming up, one at Hitachi Data Systems and the other at CNET. In preparing for them, both companies have asked me about the issue of team vs. individual blogs. This also has emerged as an issue over at Sharpcast where I am consulting. It dawns on me that this issue is cause for angst in many companies.
Should employees who are going to blog about their jobs be organized by product group, department or workgroup? Should the URL have the company name in it? Does it matter if it is hosted on Wordpress, Typepad, Movable Type or a company server?
When I first started hearing this question, I used to say it really doesn't matter. Now, I would adjust that to say it matter less than many companies realize, but there are pluses and minuses for a group blog vs individual blogs.
Pluses:
I requires less time of each blogger.
Each blogger can give a different perspective to the same project, product or service.
Group blogs fit into a neat tidy ball with the existing web site.
Minuses:
Your most passionate readers rarely go to your actual blog. They subscribe to feeds and read what you have to say in plain text. All that look and feel work you might do on a company blog, is like dressing up to entertain an occasional house guest. For your real friends, you probably appear more casually.
Most reader follow bloggers, not blogs. In short, if five people share a blogspace, each of them will develop their own followers who often skip entries by co-bloggers at the same site. I scanned my feeds this morning and was surprised at how few group blogs have reach prominence. With the exception of TechDirt, my short list of daily "must reads" has no group blogs. When I have time there are a few others I enjoy over at the Corante stable.
In fact, I think Mike Arrington has selected a wiser course. He started with TechCrunch, then branched into CrunchNotes, MobileCrunch and CrunchTalk. Each blog s written by a different person.
In short, my advice to companies is to spawn a culture that encourages people to blog about their work. Let everyone start their own blog wherever they wish. Maybe use a company site to point to list their individual URLs. Encourage synergy between blogging employees. Let them link to each other when there's relevancy. That linking will help their rankings of course.
My disclaimer, is that this advice may be obsolete in time. Companies seem more comfortable with group blogs than individual blogs. There is no reason why, with tweaking, some passionate, informative group blogs will become wildly popular.
Posted by shel israel on April 28, 2006 Permalink
http://blogsavvy.net/how-not-to-use-blogs-in-education
How NOT to use blogs in education
Update: You can now find part II, how you SHOULD use blogs in education, here.
I thought I’d summarise a paper (Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication) that I’m hoping to have accepted for ASCILITE 2005 here in two posts offering quick summaries of how I think you should & shouldn’t try to use blogs in education. If you’re into depth then you might prefer the paper, otherwise read on:Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs or learning management systems: Almost invariably the first thing people do when encountering new technologies is to try and get it to do what the technologies they are used to do and this is no exception when it comes to blogs.
Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/ group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… they are tools of centred communication and pretty far removed from community management systems like Drupal. Just don’t go there!
Don’t try and force blogging into something else: Blogging suits highly customisable, individual, owned and fiercely flexible tools like WordPress. You can try and fit blogs into other systems such as Moodle, Drupal or Tiki but you’re not going to do well because the entire centralised philosophy of these systems is utterly opposed to that of successful blogging platforms
Ignore RSS at your peril: Probably the biggest mistake that adopters tend to make is to ignore RSS or just through it a casting glance. The problem is that these people aren’t bloggers and just don’t understand. Without RSS blogs would pretty much just be extensions of geocities pages. Your learners are NEVER going to surf each others sites everyday and the majority of them won’t even go to that funky web-based aggregator you set-up.
Any more really bad ideas you could add?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 1:11 pm and is filed under General, Blogging for Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/06/whats-better-group-blog-or-individual.html
What's better, a group blog or an individual blog?
Gordon Smith has a lot of interesting things to say comparing group blogs and individual blogs. Is one sort of blog better than the other? It seems that there are a lot of variables that make some group blogs better and some individual blogs better. But what are all these variables? Gordon gets the subject going. Some pairs or sets of bloggers make each other better because they generate more posts, with more regularity, and because they play off each other or balance each other in some way. But sometimes a blogger you like adds a co-blogger to plump things up and only dilutes the quality of the blog. One blog I used to read every day added a co-blogger, and I found myself reading less and less over time, so that now I check in maybe twice a month.Some blogs have so many people it's just irritating. HuffPo is the egregious example here. What a mess! Some political hacks churn out whole columns, some comedians jot down some notes that are kind of funny if you imagine the way they'd say it out loud, and some slightly well-known people repeat very conventional observations with no style at all. No one seems capable of keeping a solo blog, but if there were a few people in there who could, I wouldn't know, because I'm not going to slog through all the bad. And I find the environment there so un-charming that it doesn't put me in the mood to find the good.I like running an individual blog, though I did temporarily group-blog last fall when Megan McCardle, Michael Totten, and I took over Instapundit (scroll down). When I did that, I still kept this blog going, and I was very aware of the different feelings I had writing in the two places. Over here, the whole blog is my self-expression. I don't have to stop and think about whether my saying something is good for the group. But operating within a group is good in different ways. It occurred to me as I wrote that that it's like the difference between living single and living in a family. There are benefits and limitations in both, but once you've made your choice, it's going to change what kind of a person you are.Gordon wonders whether some individual bloggers -- he names me and two others -- could make some big, popular megablog, and he thinks it probably wouldn't work. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I guess that's a compliment! Are there people you want to read solo whom you'd like less if they were matched up with some appropriate co-bloggers? (And who would be appropriate for me?) And are there group blogs that you read that are written by individuals you'd shun if they set up a separate site?A side note: the group blogs Gordon especially likes -- Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, and Volokh Conspiracy -- all put the blogger's name at the beginning of the post. I wish all group and partnership blogs would follow this pattern. Too many times have I read a post thinking it was one blogger only to realize it was one of the others, and on some blogs I only like one of the bloggers, and that little extra trouble of scrolling down to see the name and then back up to start reading is a disincentive to go over there at all. I know this is a default in the software, but changing it is important!
Group Blogs:
Content flows between authors
Social networking tool
Published more for the group
Requires less time of authors than individual
Each author can provide unique perspective
More organized and compact than individual
Generate more regular posts and reply posts than individual
Individual Blogs:
Promotes self
Primarily one’s own experiences
More rich, detailed narratives – more autobiographical/diary-like
More “outside” readers enjoy reading individual rather than group blogs
Individual bloggers develop a clearer, more diversified online personality than group bloggers
My conclusion from today’s research is that it doesn’t really matter which method of blogging you choose. Each of the below articles are highly subjective and most do not pertain to your purpose of blogging.
Next time, I will look at comparisons between group blogs and online discussion boards, particularly WebCT. I will review the research, break it down, and extrapolate the main points. As I’m collecting this research, let me know which method of online communication you think would work best for your Spring course. When you have decided, I will learn how to properly set it up for your course so its ready to go for January.
Brad
Here are the articles I researched today (the hyperlinks are listed first):
http://www.sinkingships.net/group-vs-individual-blogging/
Group vs. individual blogging
I’ll break my holiday (and GRE)-induced silence to follow up on a conversation that I was having with Dan and Karine on their respective blogs—the idea of group vs. individual blogging. Which is preferable in the context of student-generated admission blogs?
My gut feeling is that the closer admissions blogs hew to their prospectives’ online behavior, the better. I like the idea of a group blog. To me, the interaction between students on a group blog is what makes it more interesting than a collection of student bloggers that don’t talk to one another. It’s like that title screen on the Brady Bunch: What makes the family compelling is that they’re interacting with each other even though they’re in separate boxes. (I will apologize for this metaphor in advance, because I’m sure it will elicit groans.) On a group student blog such as the University of Sydney’s Sydney Life group blog, the students have created a small community rather than a collection of hermetically sealed individuals. At Ball State University, the main page of student bloggers is even set up as a Brady Bunch-esque series of boxes. A quick glance at BSU’s bloggers reveals that they are indeed aware of each other and mention their fellow bloggers in their posts.
Is this a good thing for admissions-oriented blogs? Well, it depends. In the case of Sydney Life, the goal of the blog is to provide advice and information to incoming students and—to a lesser extent—prospective students. This differs from other admissions blogs which aim to promote archetypal personalities as representatives of a particular institution. The latter type is more focused on presenting the cohesive story of an individual. Reading one of these blogs is like reading someone’s personal diary.
Both types of sites exist outside the admissions sphere. There are individual blogs concerned with promotion of the self and there are group blogs where the content flows from interaction between the authors. The line between the two types is blurring, particularly with the growing popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. On these sites, users are involved in both maintenance of their digital identity and participation in their social circle. Their blog postings exhibit the characteristics of a group blog (responding to other users’ postings) while retaining the core individuality of a personal blog (posting primarily about their own experiences).
There may be a limit to the benefits of a group blog, however—at a certain point, group blogs may become too self-referential and exclusionary to outsiders. You can see this in a group blog where the vast majority of the comments come from group members. There’s a lot of activity, but a lot of it is internal and the external audience (prospective students) may be discouraged from participating in such an insular group. There’s a fine line that admissions blogs have to walk between the individuality of its student bloggers and the interplay within the group. Awareness of and interaction with your fellow bloggers is great as long as you’re mindful of the wider audience (and the ultimate goal of the blog) as well.
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/04/individual_vs_t.html
April 28, 2006
Individual vs. Team Blogs
I have a couple of half-day workshops on blog strategy coming up, one at Hitachi Data Systems and the other at CNET. In preparing for them, both companies have asked me about the issue of team vs. individual blogs. This also has emerged as an issue over at Sharpcast where I am consulting. It dawns on me that this issue is cause for angst in many companies.
Should employees who are going to blog about their jobs be organized by product group, department or workgroup? Should the URL have the company name in it? Does it matter if it is hosted on Wordpress, Typepad, Movable Type or a company server?
When I first started hearing this question, I used to say it really doesn't matter. Now, I would adjust that to say it matter less than many companies realize, but there are pluses and minuses for a group blog vs individual blogs.
Pluses:
I requires less time of each blogger.
Each blogger can give a different perspective to the same project, product or service.
Group blogs fit into a neat tidy ball with the existing web site.
Minuses:
Your most passionate readers rarely go to your actual blog. They subscribe to feeds and read what you have to say in plain text. All that look and feel work you might do on a company blog, is like dressing up to entertain an occasional house guest. For your real friends, you probably appear more casually.
Most reader follow bloggers, not blogs. In short, if five people share a blogspace, each of them will develop their own followers who often skip entries by co-bloggers at the same site. I scanned my feeds this morning and was surprised at how few group blogs have reach prominence. With the exception of TechDirt, my short list of daily "must reads" has no group blogs. When I have time there are a few others I enjoy over at the Corante stable.
In fact, I think Mike Arrington has selected a wiser course. He started with TechCrunch, then branched into CrunchNotes, MobileCrunch and CrunchTalk. Each blog s written by a different person.
In short, my advice to companies is to spawn a culture that encourages people to blog about their work. Let everyone start their own blog wherever they wish. Maybe use a company site to point to list their individual URLs. Encourage synergy between blogging employees. Let them link to each other when there's relevancy. That linking will help their rankings of course.
My disclaimer, is that this advice may be obsolete in time. Companies seem more comfortable with group blogs than individual blogs. There is no reason why, with tweaking, some passionate, informative group blogs will become wildly popular.
Posted by shel israel on April 28, 2006 Permalink
http://blogsavvy.net/how-not-to-use-blogs-in-education
How NOT to use blogs in education
Update: You can now find part II, how you SHOULD use blogs in education, here.
I thought I’d summarise a paper (Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication) that I’m hoping to have accepted for ASCILITE 2005 here in two posts offering quick summaries of how I think you should & shouldn’t try to use blogs in education. If you’re into depth then you might prefer the paper, otherwise read on:Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs or learning management systems: Almost invariably the first thing people do when encountering new technologies is to try and get it to do what the technologies they are used to do and this is no exception when it comes to blogs.
Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/ group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… they are tools of centred communication and pretty far removed from community management systems like Drupal. Just don’t go there!
Don’t try and force blogging into something else: Blogging suits highly customisable, individual, owned and fiercely flexible tools like WordPress. You can try and fit blogs into other systems such as Moodle, Drupal or Tiki but you’re not going to do well because the entire centralised philosophy of these systems is utterly opposed to that of successful blogging platforms
Ignore RSS at your peril: Probably the biggest mistake that adopters tend to make is to ignore RSS or just through it a casting glance. The problem is that these people aren’t bloggers and just don’t understand. Without RSS blogs would pretty much just be extensions of geocities pages. Your learners are NEVER going to surf each others sites everyday and the majority of them won’t even go to that funky web-based aggregator you set-up.
Any more really bad ideas you could add?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 1:11 pm and is filed under General, Blogging for Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/06/whats-better-group-blog-or-individual.html
What's better, a group blog or an individual blog?
Gordon Smith has a lot of interesting things to say comparing group blogs and individual blogs. Is one sort of blog better than the other? It seems that there are a lot of variables that make some group blogs better and some individual blogs better. But what are all these variables? Gordon gets the subject going. Some pairs or sets of bloggers make each other better because they generate more posts, with more regularity, and because they play off each other or balance each other in some way. But sometimes a blogger you like adds a co-blogger to plump things up and only dilutes the quality of the blog. One blog I used to read every day added a co-blogger, and I found myself reading less and less over time, so that now I check in maybe twice a month.Some blogs have so many people it's just irritating. HuffPo is the egregious example here. What a mess! Some political hacks churn out whole columns, some comedians jot down some notes that are kind of funny if you imagine the way they'd say it out loud, and some slightly well-known people repeat very conventional observations with no style at all. No one seems capable of keeping a solo blog, but if there were a few people in there who could, I wouldn't know, because I'm not going to slog through all the bad. And I find the environment there so un-charming that it doesn't put me in the mood to find the good.I like running an individual blog, though I did temporarily group-blog last fall when Megan McCardle, Michael Totten, and I took over Instapundit (scroll down). When I did that, I still kept this blog going, and I was very aware of the different feelings I had writing in the two places. Over here, the whole blog is my self-expression. I don't have to stop and think about whether my saying something is good for the group. But operating within a group is good in different ways. It occurred to me as I wrote that that it's like the difference between living single and living in a family. There are benefits and limitations in both, but once you've made your choice, it's going to change what kind of a person you are.Gordon wonders whether some individual bloggers -- he names me and two others -- could make some big, popular megablog, and he thinks it probably wouldn't work. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I guess that's a compliment! Are there people you want to read solo whom you'd like less if they were matched up with some appropriate co-bloggers? (And who would be appropriate for me?) And are there group blogs that you read that are written by individuals you'd shun if they set up a separate site?A side note: the group blogs Gordon especially likes -- Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, and Volokh Conspiracy -- all put the blogger's name at the beginning of the post. I wish all group and partnership blogs would follow this pattern. Too many times have I read a post thinking it was one blogger only to realize it was one of the others, and on some blogs I only like one of the bloggers, and that little extra trouble of scrolling down to see the name and then back up to start reading is a disincentive to go over there at all. I know this is a default in the software, but changing it is important!
posted by Brad | 8:29 AM
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